In my opinion, this “object soup” violates a principle called information hiding. In the three-tier architecture you describe, information hiding is explicit in the architecture. In “object soup” information hiding is not part of the overall architecture.

It is true that an OO principle of design is “… to couple data and the computations that act on that data together in the objects …”. Yes, this is true in general. However, you are still suppose to design things. For example in Arthur J. Riel’s “Object-Oriented Design Heuristics” book, states many heuristics which the OO application here violates, such as:

heuristic 4.13) A class must know what it contains, but it should never know who contains it.

Design, in the abstract, is reducible to principles, guidelines, etc. However, a designer is still expected to use these principles, guidelines, and judgement. It is perhaps why designers will probably never be taught entirely from a list of rules.

Thank you for your article, I enjoyed reading it.